This is my second blog review in a series where I look at my subscribers blogs and point out what I think is good and what I think is bad about them. Last week I reviewed ‘Mommy Meryl‘, Meryl actually took on board some of my points and adjusted her blog to make her blog easier to read for her visitors.

As I pointed out last week, I am not telling the blogger what to do, I am just sharing my blogging experience and hopefully you can pick up some tips on how to improve your blogs as well.

This weeks blog is ClubBlogger.com, the blog is run by Larry, here is a quote from the about page:

ClubBlogger was created to share the latest and greatest in the blogging world, how to make money from your blog and other methods, and a place to go to find out how to be a better blogger!

The Club Blogger staff has had extensive experience blogging for several years now, and we have a goal to bring you top notch advice, tips, and tricks when it comes to blogging and succeeding online.

Below is a screenshot of the blog, for those of you who are not familiar with it:

My first impressions of the blog were slightly varied, the content is of good quality and informative, many bloggers would find useful. The design however has some major put-offs in terms of first impressions.

The fact is, when someone lands on your blog, you have only a few seconds to trap them and convert them to your blog, this means your blog needs to be easy on the eye and draw the user to the content.

I have picked out two points from ClubBlogger.com that I am going to talk about in this blog review. They are:

1. Advertising
2. Browser Compatibility

Advertising on blogs is something that has been talked about a lot in the blogosphere with everyone having their own views, each with advantages and disadvantages. In my opinion the two main views can be broken down into ‘Subtle’ and ‘In Your Face’.

‘Subtle Advertising’ is the one that I favour and use on my blog here, the ads are not blocking my readers from the content, nor are they obtrusive. This can have advantages such as making the blog easier for your visitors and making your blog look more professional. The disadvantages are that they can have lower CTR (Click Through Rates) which can effect performance in CPC (Cost Per Click) advertising.

‘In Your Face Advertising’ is a form of advertising where the user usually needs to click on an ad in order to earn you money, this means that your ads need to be visible and stand out to the reader. The advantages of ‘In Your Face Advertising’ are that you can earn more through CPC advertising. The disadvantage however is that it makes your blog look more unprofessional and often distracts from the content.

I much prefer the ‘Subtle’ approach on blogs, as their main focus is the written content. Going back to ClubBlogger.com you will notice that there is a mixture of the two, from my count I have found the following advertising on the homepage:

• 6 examples of ‘In Your Face Advertising’
• 9 examples of ‘Subtle Advertising’

That is alot of advertising for one page, my advice for ClubBlogger.com is to remove all In Your Face Advertising, and trim the Subtle advertising slightly to make the blog look more professional, I would suggest doing that by:

1. Removing the Adsense Leaderboard and search box from under the navigation, this will help to pull the content of the blog further above the fold, helping to attract readers to your content.
2. Remove the Adsense squares from the bottom of each post, to make browsing the content a lot easier.
3. Remove the Adbrite banner from the footer of the page, as it is to far down the blog to have any impact.
4. I would then move the 125×125 ads in the sidebar up above the ‘Image Hosting Secrets’ widget, so that they are above the fold and more appealing to potential advertisers.
5. Remove the Adbrite inline ads, they can be very annoying.

These changes may see a drop in your blogs earnings, but by converting more visitors to readers you will increase your blogs page views and unique hits so that a higher fee can be obtained in the long run for the 125×125 ads.

Here is a what the blog would look like without the ads:

I am sure most people will agree that it looks more professional and would have a better first impression when landing on that blog.

Now onto browser compatibility, this is an issue that I have seen many blogger ignore. Every browser displays blogs slightly differently, so by check the compatibility of your blog in many browsers you can be sure that all your visitors are getting a good experience of your blog. Below is an image of how my FireFox browser views the ClubBlogger.com ‘About’ page:

As you can see I cannot read the content because the yellow sticky note is covering it. You need to check to make sure that your blog is compatible with the most used browers, check your stats to see the most used browser on your blog and make sure your blog works for those browsers.

As I have said before ClubBlogger.com has some good content, the way to grow this blog is to remove the focus away from the Ads and onto the content by bringing the content up above the fold and by sticking to ‘Subtle Advertising’ techniques.

Please check out ClubBlogger.com now if you have not already done so. Remember, if you want your blog reviewed, subscribe to my feed Via Email then Contact Me informing me you wish to be considered.

What are your views on ClubBlogger.com? Do you enjoy these reviews? Is there anything I should change about the reviews?

I have decided that I will now do blog reviews on a weekly basis, to help bloggers understand what I think is good and what I think is bad in terms of blog design. I will be reviewing the blogs of people who subscribe to ProTycoon.com via email, so to be in with a shout, Subscribe to ProTycoon.com via Email and then drop me a message via the Contact page letting me know your email address and Blog address.

This weeks blog review is about Mommy Meryl:

Before we look at the blog let me in introduce you to Meryl, this is an extract from her ‘About’ page:

I’m Meryl and I’m a thirty-something stay-at-home (SAHM) but sometimes part-time working mom to a 5 1/2 year old daughter. I have been married 13 years to a wonderfully supportive husband and 2 dogs complete our family for the moment. . . I began this blog as a supplement to my website – Chit Chat for Mommies.

If you don’t have an about page on your blog then I suggest you read: Writing an About page.

Here is a quick screenshot of the blog for reference:

The first thing that I noticed about the blog is that it took a long time to load, I think there are two main reasons for this:

1. The blogs header image is very large.
2. There are 15 Full posts on the homepage

I am a firm believer that every blog should have a unique header image/logo, but I think that they should be no taller than around 80-90px. My thinking behind this is that larger images take a longer time to load, also by having a larger banner your content is being pushed further down the page and below the fold. When I look at the blog, all I can see is the first posts title and the first few lines of content. If you compare that to my homepage, you can usually see the title and the whole excerpt for my blogs first post. I would suggest a new slightly smaller blog header image.

The homepage also has 15 full posts on it, which means that it is a very long page. There are two options to improve this, the first is to simply reduce the number of posts being shown, my suggestion would be 8 full posts on the blogs homepage. The other option is to only show excerpts on the blogs homepage, this will reduce the size of each post, making the page size smaller, I usually recommend a maximum of 10 posts on the homepage when using excerpts, I use 5 on the ProTycoon.com homepage.

Now we will look at the colour scheme being used, it is very much based around Pink, Purple and Blue. The post titles are orange and the posts content is pink. I find the bright pink very difficult to read, so is not the best choice of color for the blogs content. My suggestion would be to use black text with a slightly darker pink post title. The links on the site are blue, which is the color most people associate with links. On the whole the blogs colours reflect the content of the blog.

The final point I am going to make about Meryl’s blog is the sidebars, the blog currently has two sidebars. The left sidebar is based on the blog, it has the RSS subscribe box, current RSS count and a link to the ‘About’ page which should be on all blogs. My advice about the left sidebar would be to remove the ‘Live Traffic Feed’ as it is not really suited to a blog in this niche.

The right sidebar contains the blogroll, the archives as well as many links to other blogs and directories, many of which are in the form of images, which will slow the page loading times. There is also a ‘Top Spots’ widget which is becoming more common on blogs in recent months. My advice for the right sidebar would be to remove a lot of the image links, they can either be deleted permanently, or replaced with text links in the blogroll. I would then move the archives to the top of the right sidebar, followed by the ‘Top Spots’ widget then the blogroll.

Above I stated what I would do if I was keeping the two sidebars, I always prefer blogs with 2 columns, this could be achieved by moving the RSS subscribe box and current subscriber count to the top of the right sidebar, then create some pages and link to them just underneath the RSS details, these pages can consist of an ‘About’ page, and ‘Link To Us’ page and a ‘Contact’ page. This would take some strain off of the homepage and make the blog look a lot cleaner.

I would like to point out at this point that I am not critising Meryls blog, I think Meryl has a great blog and some interesting content for her niche. I am using the blog reviews to show people how they can improve their blogs, by sharing my viewpoints and the things I have learned through blogging. You may have a blog similar to Meryl’s and may find some of these points relevant.

I would like to know what you think of Meryl’s blog? What would you improve? What are your thoughts on my opinions?

Don’t forget to Subscribe to ProTycoon.com via email to be in with a chance of getting reviewed next week.

Last month I brought you my WidgetBucks Review, this month I write about Chitika. I will let you into my experiences with Chitika as well as ways to optimize it to work for your site.

Chitika is an alternative to Google AdSense and WidgetBucks’ Contextual Pay-Per-Click Advertising. I run Chitika on several of my blogs, including this one. It performs best on product related blogs, but can achieve good results on blogs such as this on also. You can see what the Ads look like by looking at the ‘Related Products’ section below my blog posts.

Here is an extract from the Chitika Publishers website that contains two stats that show Chitika is a respected Ads Publisher:

Fact 1: Chitika has over 70+ power-packed revenue earning ad units, the largest collection of revenue-generating solutions catering to publishers of all sizes.

Fact 2: More than 17000 bloggers and publishers are already using Chitika’s ads to earn revenue.

One of the coolest things about Chitika is that you are allowed to use them on the same page as Google AdSense so you can maximize the earning potential of your blog. Chitika tends to have a higher CPC than Google AdSense in alot of the areas I have used it in.

As Chitika is still new to me, I have only been running it for around a month, I cannot give a full review, but this is what I can tell you, It is currently outperforming Google AdSense and WidgetBucks.

In order to help you earn to your full potential with Chitika I have provided you with some links that helped me to get started:

1. How To Improve Your Chitika Ad Performance at ProBlogger.net
2. More Chitika Ad Optimizing Tips at ProBlogger.net
3. How To Make Money from Internal Search Traffic with Chitika at ProBlogger.net
4. Chitika eMiniMalls Review at CyberWyre

What you waiting for, Try Chitika Now!

Let us know your views or experiences with Chitika and how it has performed for you.

Killer Domains is the first E-book to be released by Daily Blog Tips author Daniel Socco. It works as a guide to creating good/killer domain names that are marketable. The full title of the E-book is: “Killer Domains: Tools & Techniques to Find the Perfect Domain Name”. It does exactly what it says on the label.

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